Debut Author Interviews

What drew you to the conflict you created for your main character?

• A.C.E. Bauer on...Character's Conflict
• Eric Luper on...Character's Conflict
• Melissa Marr on...Character's Conflict
• Carrie Jones on...Character's Conflict
• Heather Tomlinson on...Character's Conflict
• Kelly Bingham on...Character's Conflict
• Tiffany Trent on...Character's Conflict
• Paula Chase on...Character's Conflict
• Joni Sensel on...Character's Conflict
• Ruth McNally Barshaw on...Character's Conflict
• S.A. Harazin on...Character's Conflict
• G. Neri on...Character's Conflict
• Sarah Beth Durst on...Character's Conflict
• Autumn Cornwell on...Character's Conflict
• Ann Dee Ellis on...Character's Conflict
• Judy Gregerson on...Character's Conflict
• Jay Asher on...Character's Conflict
• Jeannine Garsee on...Character's Conflict

What drew you to the conflict you created for your main character?

The conflict came out of my character and the setting. I decided early on that I didn’t want Augie to be particularly smart, nor particularly stupid. On the surface, I wanted him to have a significant weakness (he’s scrawny and the target of bullies) and at least one obvious strength (the ability to sing well). I placed him in a tough neighborhood in Camden, NJ, made him attend an inner-city school, and gave him a mother but no father. Then I had him steal a magical book of fairy tales, and conflict seemed to come to him pretty quick.

What drew you to the conflict you created for your main character?

My first chapter was birthed well before I had envisioned anything resembling a poker novel. In fact, my first chapter was more of a writing exercise intended to challenge myself to convey character to a reader with little to no interaction with others. I wanted readers to understand and like Andrew in as short a time as possible.

When I finished the pages and read it to my critique group, it sat on my hard drive for over a year!

Then, upon rereading it, the conflict started a-brewin’—or percolating as I like to call it. I asked myself, “What happens when a kid thinks he’s really good at poker but starts to lose badly?” It spiraled downward from there.

What drew you to the conflict you created for your main character?

Is it awful to admit that I have no idea how to answer this? I’ll try, but I can’t promise clarity here.

There’s no one single conflict—which FWIW, made writing a query, synopsis, & jacket copy challenging. WICKED LOVELY has three main characters who tell parts of their story. They each have goals that are in opposition to at least one of the others. For me, the conflict derived from having three characters who each needed to and deserved to win, but simply could not. As I wrote each thread (the sections are interwoven so the POV varies by chapter), the conflict was simply a result of the characters’ goals and desires colliding.

What draws me to this? To me, it feels like life. No person is completely good or evil. No person is able to “win” or “lose.” We’re all just out here trying to do the best we can with the lot we drew. Examining that theory—with the added tension of really high stakes—seemed intriguing to me.

What drew you to the conflict you created for your main character?

Somewhat like Melissa’s book, I tend to write characters with multiple conflicts. The poor babies just keep getting it layered on.

So, Belle’s conflicts in TIPS ON HAVING A GAY (ex) BOYFRIEND, is essentially trying to re-understand her life and identity, once her big-time boyfriend tells her he’s gay. Belle has to struggle with the belief that she knows people, when she doesn’t.

She has to struggle with the questions:
1. How is it possible to ever know someone?
2. And if you can’t truly ever know someone, can you ever truly love them?
3. Once you realize this can you be open to relationships again?

Belle is a super liberal who somehow compartmentalizes people in her quest for understanding, while at the same time eschewing labels.

Her struggle is very Wallace Stevens inspired… What do we do when we realize that reality isn’t static, that our imaginations and our notions create a reality that is ever changing?

Poor Belle.

I guess what haunts me is whether or not, as Americans, we can get over our desire to absolutely know people in order to love them; if we can embrace the mystery of others as part of our love for them; and if we can embrace ourselves for failing to be omniscent. Knowledge is power, but is it always? I’m not sure…
Or even more importantly, how to come to terms with Stevens’ concept of reality as a product of the imagination.

What drew you to the conflict you created for your main character?

I wanted to know what was going on behind the scenes. Since I was retelling a fairy tale, I knew what would happen, but wrote the novel to find out why.

Why would a girl who could obviously work magic feel like she needed to wait for a guy to come along, and pretend he was the one completing the impossible tasks to win her hand? Then, after they had successfully escaped her family’s pursuit, why would she set him up to fail? And then reconcile with him later?

Parent-child conflicts, relationship conflicts—they fascinate me when I’m eavesdropping at the coffee shop, so I knew I’d want to figure out what was happening with these characters, too.

What drew you to the conflict you created for your main character?

Without getting completely personal and self-indulgent, I will just say that at the time I began SHARK GIRL, I was feeling a great sense of loss, and my little world had been turned upside down. About the same time, I read about the shark attacks sweeping the news. (This was summer of 2001.) When I began to write about a young boy involved in a life-changing shark attack, an older female character kept stepping into my head. She wanted the story to be about her. So I listened, and I wrote, drawn to her pain, her courage, her setbacks, and her journey back to putting her life together. I had no idea how the story would unfold as I wrote it, but that was half the fun; finding out as I went. Writing SHARK GIRL was a wonderful experience.

What drew you to the conflict you created for your main character?

When my main character Corrine showed up, I have to admit I was a little flummoxed. Like a lot of people in her life, I hadn’t noticed Corrine at all. She was very quiet, almost mousy. As I got to know her, though, I saw her be defiant, willful, even a little bad. And I thought, hmmm…she’s really quite interesting. What draws me to her is that she has to make choices which often have terrible consequences without foreknowlege of the situation—a lot like real life. I like seeing what’s going to happen when she chooses, especially when she chooses…poorly.

What drew you to the conflict you created for your main character?

My own experiences as a teen and watching my daughter go through the same is what drew me to my character’s conflict. A lot of African American suburban teens go through this…identity crisis, for lack of a better word, at some point in their young lives. It’s the point where they suddenly realize that despite sharing a lot in common with their white peers, there are still some things that are different. And sometimes those differences can cause you to re-evaluate your friendships.

I’m fascinated by the issue because I’ve noticed that although the generations are becoming more and more color blind, this “awareness” seems to be inevitable.

What drew you to the conflict you created for your main character?

My protag’s character issues are partly my own, and come partly from observing issues of trust in a teenaged friend of mine who was abandoned by her mother at an early age.

The answers to this question from our group are pretty varied, but I’m a firm believer that the first purpose of writing is to explain life to ourselves, so I tend to believe that most themes and character arcs ultimately come from the writer’s personality and life experiences. This has always been borne out in my critique groups, too, once I know the members well enough to tell.

What drew you to the conflict you created for your main character?

My main character is Ellie McDoodle.
She travels with relatives she can’t stand, and she keeps a sketch journal of it all.
The idea for the conflict came from my own family. I have 8 brothers and sisters.
And a zillion cousins, aunts, uncles and inlaws.
Ellie is me.
(But of course I adore all my relatives)

What drew you to the conflict you created for your main character?

The conflict seemed to arise naturally from the character and the setting. The story is set mostly in a hospital so at any time of day or night something bad is happening, and my character is impacted by what is going on around him. He tends to screw up a lot. At other times he is with his friends. He tries to fit in, but he cannot.

I like writing about ordinary characters thrown into extraordinary situations. How they react and deal with the conflict usually comes as a surprise to me. I also discover something about myself or realize something I should have known but didn’t until my character had the experience.

What drew you to the conflict you created for your main character?

The conflict of my main character Roger is one will all have these days: fighting through the soundbites and B&W portrayals of the media and politicians to get at the truth. Everyone has an opinion these days and there are plenty out there willing to exploit an issue for their own gain. In this story, an 11-year-old kid kills a neighborhood girl and he himself is later killed by the gang he tried to impress. Was the kid a thug or a victim? Was he responsible for his actions or are others to blame?

The lesson the main character learns is that life is not black and white. The world is full of greys. Good people can do bad things and bad people can do good things. We must dig deeper for the truth and decide for ourselves before casting judgement on anyone, be it a killer, a politician or ourselves.

What drew you to the conflict you created for your main character?

In 1986, my hometown of Northboro, Massachusetts, was temporarily transformed into a fairy-tale kingdom. It recovered after a few days, but I was left with a lingering fear of glass slippers. My novel INTO THE WILD is my attempt to come to grips with…

OK, so that didn’t really happen. But wouldn’t that have been cool? This thought is what drew me to my main character’s conflict.

What drew you to the conflict you created for your main character?

There are a bunch of conflicts in CARPE DIEM which fascinate me — like “fish out of water” and “travel transforms” which I’ve already covered in other questions. So here I’ll deal with the more internal ones — like the struggle between “spending all your time achieving versus taking time to enjoy life.” Vassar is determined to succeed in life. And as a sixteen year old, her self-imposed path to success begins and ends with getting into an Ivy League college. But when she’s forced to backpack through Southeast Asia during the summer with her whacky artist grandma instead of taking crucial Advanced Placement classes (and Advanced Advanced Placement classes!) she has the choice to either LIM (Live in the Moment) or continue obsessing about her future. Additionally, she’s forced to define “success” for herself – not just copy what her parents, teachers, or friends think.

The struggle between the present and the future can be best summed up in my novel’s epilogue from Pascal’s Pensees:

“Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never without end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”

So, if Vassar can learn to LIM, she’ll at least have control over the moments. Or will she? Which brings us to another conflict: do you determine the course of your life or does God? Is there even a God? Dum dum dum DUM! Vassar finds herself in a situation where she has nothing else to do but mull this over. Like many of us, she refuses to ponder the big questions in life until she’s forced into it. And boy howdy, is she forced!

Yep, it turns out CARPE DIEM contains all the textbook conflicts: man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. self, man vs. God. Who knew?

What drew you to the conflict you created for your main character?

I was sitting in an empty three story house that my husband and I were renting for the summer. We had been married one week and he was at work. I was sitting on the floor (we had no furniture and weren’t planning on getting any) with my laptop buzzing. I wasn’t going to work that summer; instead we had decided I would write a novel. I remember feeling so alone that May morning. I was supposed to sit all day every day in this hollow house and write? It was a weird sense of emptiness I hadn’t anticipated.

I wrote five sentences and Logan, my main character was born. He was lonely. He was confused. He was awkward. He was supposed to be a normal kid happy with normal things. But he wasn’t.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I was drawn to Logan because he was so different from me but so much the same as me. We often have feelings we don’t count on. Feelings we don’t understand and in many cases don’t want to understand. Logan was loaded down with these confusions and the two of us had to work them out together.

Plus, like Logan, I like palindromes and I really like the outfits at The Hot Dog Factory.

What drew you to the conflict you created for your main character?

My story is about a girl who has given up everything to save her mentally ill and abusive mother and her little sister. But she makes the mistake of giving up her soul and losing her perspective on the value of her life and believing the lie that she’s a “bad girl”. I really relate to that issue because I think there are so many kids who are told they’re “bad” and they’re really not. They’re just suffering because of problems at home like abuse, alcoholism, drug use, or abandonment, etc.

I wanted to be able to speak to those kids and to those who know them by saying, “Look, here’s a kid who goes through this horrible time. She makes some bad choices. But she makes them for the right reason, even though they’re the worst possible things she could do.”

Mostly, I wanted to give a voice to the kids who hide what goes on in some homes (their own) because I was one of those kids and it would have helped me to know that I wasn’t alone.

What drew you to the conflict you created for your main character?

Tension!

For many years, I wanted to write a novel with a particular format. Instead of chapters, the story unfolds using the two sides of a bunch of audiotapes (Chapter 1 = Cassette 1: Side A). The listener (Character A) goes on a self-guided tour around his or her town, lead by the voice on the tapes (Character B). So I needed a story to bind both of my characters together. For some reason it took me years to ask the question, If I were to come home and find a shoebox full of audiotapes on my doorstep, what would I not want the tapes to be about? Answer: I definitely wouldn’t want them to be the suicide tapes of someone I knew…with my name mentioned on them.

That idea freaked me out so much that I had to write my first YA novel, 13 Reasons Why.

What drew you to the conflict you created for your main character?

Well, this is difficult. As far as the substance issues are concerned, I grew up around alcoholics, and I was never really shown a way to deal with it back then. Resources, such as Alateen, were available, but I was discouraged from participating. My best friend dealt with the same problem which, in the end, effectively destroyed her life. Kids need to know that they are not alone, that there are people who can help them understand that what goes on in their families is not their fault at all.